The High Court’s judgment in Ashley Hurst v Solicitors Regulation Authority overturning a Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal sanction could have wider application, a solicitor’s appeal over a 12-month suspension has heard.
Scott Halborg, a partner at Leicester firm Deals & Disputes Solicitors LLP, was suspended from practice for 12 months and ordered to pay £30,630 costs in April last year after he was found to have failed to conduct litigation in accordance with his duties as an officer of the court. He appealed the SDT’s finding and sanction arguing the SRA’s case was ‘entirely misconceived’.
Halborg, who represented himself during his appeal at the Royal Courts of Justice, said the sanction was ‘excessive, unnecessary and disproportionate’ adding: ‘It was not necessary to suspend for 12 months, indeed it was completely counter-productive to do so.’ There was ‘no reason for the SRA to actually become involved’, he said. ‘The sanction should have just been a rebuke given the technical breaches admitted in the statement of agreed facts and also the cooperation with the SRA throughout.’
Halborg told the court that ‘the conduct complained of was a series of judicial orders and comments’ related to his conduct ‘as a litigant rather than any act or omission as a solicitor’.
‘The integrity breach should never have been made out,’ he said. The SDT’s reasons were published four months after the hearing and ‘as with Hurst’ had ‘no focus at all’.
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‘There was no clear link between comments that they gave and the breach of integrity. Just as in Hurst there has been a misdirection and error of law, as a result the tribunal has come to a conclusion that is not properly open to it and cannot be upheld by this court.
‘I am not really accused of doing anything wrong as a solicitor as such, more as a litigant. The SRA case was entirely misconceived as to integrity.’
Benjamin Tankel, for the SRA, told the court Halborg had initially admitted two of the allegations and denied the third ‘which was that he had conducted himself in a way that gave rise to judicial criticism and breach of procedural rules’. However the day before the SDT hearing, in a statement of agreed facts, he ‘admits allegation 1.3 and makes admissions on all the facts that were in the Rule 12 statement. He admits very serious breaches of SRA Rules [about] unarguable cases and wasting the courts time’.
Halborg had ‘agreed that these allegations breach principles and rules that the SRA regulator has set for professionals’, Tankel added. ‘This is a solicitor conducting himself in court, whether or not he is technically on the record. Even if it was personal conduct, the SRA does not agree with [the] way in which Mr Halborg described integrity as working in this context.’
Tankel said the administrative court's ruing in Hurst, which overturned the SDT finding against a solicitor over ‘without prejudice’ correspondence, was ‘very fresh’. He added: ‘I do not know whether the SRA has a view yet about whether that finding, the finding that professional integrity requires elevated standard of proof and reasoning, is accepted by the SRA. It seems to be a point of possible wider application.
‘Even if there is elevated standard of proof and reasoning, that is made out in this case. This is not a complicated case about SLAPPs. This is about a solicitor who conducted himself so vexatiously in court that he was made subject to a civil restraint order.
‘To the extent the tribunal found this was a deliberate scheme to frustrate efficient judicial processes. This was a very clearcut case in my submission.’
The hearing, which was listed for a day, overran and was adjourned for a later date.
